Many agricultural pesticides, including insecticides, fungicides, herbicides, miticides, and plant growth regulators, are applied in the form of a liquid composition. In addition to the pesticide, such liquid compositions typically include one or more adjuvant compounds intended to improve one or more properties of the liquid composition, such as for example, storage stability, ease of handling, and/or pesticide efficacy against target organisms.
There has been an interest in adjuvants reduce drift of spray applied pesticides and the addition of high molecular weight water soluble polymers to spray compositions as a tank mix to increase droplet size and thereby reduce drift of pesticides in known, see, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,874,096 and U.S. Pat. No. 6,214,771. Such polymeric drift control additives tend to perform best within a relatively narrow range of concentration, for example, in spray compositions comprising from about 0.05 to 0.15 percent by weight of such polymer. More recently other approaches, such as the use of certain “self-emulsifiable” esters as drift control agents, see U.S. Patent Publication No. 2010/0113275 A1, have been described.
There is a continuing interest in developing adjuvants for controlling drift of spray applied pesticides that exhibit high performance when present in a spray composition in low amount and that are relatively insensitive to the amount of adjuvant in the spray composition.